The modern, centralized American state was supposedly born in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Kimberley S. Johnson argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Cooperative federalism was not born in a Big Bang, but instead emerged out of power struggles within the nation's major political institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examining the fifty-two years from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the Great Depression, Johnson shows that the "first New Federalism" was created during this era from dozens of policy initiatives enacted by a modernizing Congress. The expansion of national power took the shape of policy instruments that reflected the constraints imposed by the national courts and the Constitution, but that also satisfied emergent policy coalitions of interest groups, local actors, bureaucrats, and members of Congress. Thus, argues Johnson, the New Deal was not a decisive break with the past, but rather a superstructure built on a foundation that emerged during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Her evidence draws on an analysis of 131 national programs enacted between 1877 and 1930, a statistical analysis of these programs, and detailed case studies of three of them: the Federal Highway Act of 1916, the Food and Drug Act of 1906, and the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921. As this book shows, federalism has played a vital but often underappreciated role in shaping the modern American state.

List of Figures viiList of Tables ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The First New Federalism and the Making of the Modern American State 1


Chapter One: Congress and Statebuilding in a Federal Polity 15


Chapter Two: Intergovernmental Policy Instruments and the Development of the New Federalist State 38


Chapter Three: Congressional Politics, Structure, and the Enactment of IPIs 59


Chapter Four: Nationalizing Regulation: The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 85


Chapter Five: Goods Roads to Fiscal Stimulus: Highway Policy from 1900 to the New Deal 116


Chapter Six: From Healthy Babies to the Welfare State: The Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 136


Chapter Seven: The First New Federalism and the Governing of a New American State 156


Appendix 165
Notes 169
Index 215